[Updated] Despite setting the fastest time this season for a pit stop, with a 2.4 second stop in Valencia, McLaren has had its fair share of problems this season in the pits.

And in today’s British Grand Prix they were under pressure again as they were faced the the possibility of having to use a stand in on the right rear corner of the car after the regular mechanic was injured in Valencia during the safety car period stop which went wrong for the team and lost Hamilton track position to Alonso.

Apparently the Ferrari chief mechanic who operates the lights system on the Ferrari rig was standing slightly further out than normal, which meant that Hamilton had to go around him and as he came into his pit box his front wing endplate gashed the leg of the right rear gun man.

The cut was very deep, requiring stitches both internally and externally.

He did a try out this weekend and it was decided that it would be tough for him to carry to his duties, so a stand in was drafted in.

They’ve done extensive practice, but inevitably he had not been drilled as the first choice crew has been and this may have cost them a few tenths of a second or more.

In the end the injured mechanic took his place and McLaren performed the two fastest stops of the day.

I think there are some internal issues at MTC and the buck stops at Whitmarsh's desk to get it fixed. McLaren's problems did not start this year. I believe they started when McLaren came under Whitmarsh's leadership.

In my experience whenever a team (that's been performing poorly) decides to use their B team or reserve guy, they tend to do better for some reason even though the reserve wasn't considered to be that good.

This scenario can usually be seen in football so am silently optimist that Mclaren will have no problems today.

Though what might throw the team off it's balance again is if there's a safety car and all the teams decide to pit on the same lap, yes, this is usually when Mclaren panic the most and thus mistakes.

Meanwhile, I don't know where I have been, first time am reading about what happened to the Mclaren mechanic in Valencia, all over a sudden, I do not feel so bitter and yes, get well soon fella.

It was also their fault that the McLaren jack failed. New evidence recently came out that Montezemolo is directly responsible for the Pompeii eruption, the Exxon-Valdez oil spill, the Chernobyl meltdown, and the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs. They have a lot to answer for.

I don't know if anyone else saw this, but I thought I noticed (as I was watching Q3) that when Hamilton came in to swap his wets for inters that there seemed to a slight delay on the right rear corner wheel change.

Can McLaren not approach another F1 team and offer to buy their entire pit crew? Because I think the current Macca crew's confidence must be through the floor. And chopping and changing individual members of the team must be more of a disruption to pitstop rhythm than installing a new team?

@Il Leeone - you can't "buy" a pit crew. The number of team members is closely regulated, and all of the "pit crew" actually have other jobs (I almost said "real" jobs) as mechanics, engineers, etc. So they are mechanics first, pit crew guys second. Given McLaren's overall reliability and usual good prep work, they are obviously very good at their main job. And frankly, most of the pit problems seem to me to be _design_ problems, i.e., titanium wheel nuts that are lighter but have different expansion characteristics than the hub, making them difficult to thread, experimental front jacks that worked 95%+ of the time in practice, but failed in the race when Lewis hit it too hard, etc. These things are not down to the pit crew - they were engineered in Woking. The bad pit stops are the price not of a bad pit crew, but the price of innovations that haven't (yet) panned out. That miracle pit stop they had was what was achievable when all of these innovations are debugged - should that ever happen. We say that we long for the days when F1 was full of experimentation - and McLaren is reminding us that back in the old days, engines failed regularly, new suspensions cracked, etc. We SHOULD be cheering McLaren for their approach to bringing innovation to F1, not lambasting them for poor performance.

Isn't it about time that the cars featured on-board jacks, as in other racing series? They'd be more reliable, and stop the teams spending money on ever more complex jacks. Make the on-board jack a mandatory, FIA-standard design.

How does this work? Excuse my ignorance. Is there 1 pit crew for both Lewis and Jenson or 1 pit crew for each? If so and considering their positions in the Championship, wouldnt it make more sense to take the experienced pit member from Jenson's team and put him in Lewis' for the race, and let Jenson have the stand-in?

McLaren pitstops are fine so far, but their strategy remains puzzling. Eight lap second stint on the options ?

Also, they could profitably remind Button that they are a team. Quite why Button felt it was necessary to hold Hamilton up for a lap, and then let Grosjean straight through, immediately before pitting, is beyond me.

Totally agree. Whilst button was not obligated to let Lewis through, given they were out of sync on pit stops I'd have thought he would have been told to get out of the way and then fight to keep grosjean behind. ultimately it would have made no difference because grosjean found some speed from who knows where, but mclaren would not have known that at the time.